The long road to Tokyo: Japanese aggression in China, Southeast Asia, and
the South Pacific, with special attention to books about the Rape of Nanking,
Japanese fighter planes and pilots, the Burma campaign, and the Hiroshima bomb

JAPAN AT WAR, 1931-1945

The 'comfort women'

The New York Times has an
op-ed by Mindy Kotler about Japan's
"denialism" with respect to the sex slaves of the Second World War, whom
the Imperial Japanese army and navy knew as "comfort women." These were
mostly Koreans recruited to work in the home islands but then diverted
against their will to front-line brothels. Other nationalities, including
Dutch and American prisoners, were also forced into prostitution. According
to Kotler, the current Japanese premier is walking back the 1993 Kono
Statement that acknowledged the country's guilt in this matter, in what
was widely regarded in Asia as a long-overdue apology to the women who
were violated in this fashion.

The run-up to Pearl Harbor

An excellent book! Eri Hotta was born and raised in Tokyo but educated at Princeton and
Oxford, so she has mastered both languages and uses them well. How
often have you picked up a book whose author can say offhand that all the
translations are hers? To be sure, the title is somewhat deceptive:
Japan 1941:
Countdown to Infamy. Don't imagine that you are getting one of
those "year" books that try to squeeze a whole civilization into
twelve months. Hotta often delves into the recent past, and sometimes
even to events at the turn of the century and earlier, notably the
Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. She
has been criticized for letting Japan off too easily, and for
stressing American responsibility for the run-up to war.
Blue skies! -- Dan Ford